Feldon
From August 12-18th, SOE is offering a modest 30% off all StationCash purchased in-game or at SOE.com. Note this DOES NOT APPLY to retail-purchased StationCash refill cards, SMS purchases, or 30 day game cards. Between Friday, August 12 and Thursday, August 18, 2011, get a 30% discount* on purchases of Station Cash! Plus, check participating games for Marketplace item specials throughout the week. Check back later in the week for more details on game-specific items! Please note that the 30% discount* is on purchases of Station Cash and does not impact the redemption of SC cards. * Offer not...
Month: August 2011
SOE Security Authenticators are now available from SOE.com for $9.95 including domestic shipping and handling. They may be used on one or more Station accounts. Pricing compares favorably to the WoW Battle.net security fobs which cost $6.50 plus shipping. Plus, you may use one SOE Authenticator on multiple Station accounts, a feature the Battle.net devices lack as of October 2010. Note: Only after entering your credit card information does international shipping or handling rates appear. We’ve seen several reports that international shipping is more expensive than the security fob itself. In the range of $10-13 US, 10 Euros, $13...
Peleş Castle, Sinaia courtesy Harvard.edu From Amnerys on the EQ2 Forums: Are you ready to show off your best house? When the house ratings system launches with Game Update 61, we’d like to have a few outstanding house examples ready to show off in the Hall of Fame, so we’re asking you for some suggestions!
image courtesy fangshendo.com Does your Bard bear a secret admiration for the martial arts? Does your barbarian Shadowknight aspire to move with the deftness of a butterfly? Maybe you’ve just been feeling a little punchy? Silliness aside, the latest patch to the Test servers seems to have had an unintended consequence: Every class has now inherited the Class and Subclass trees of a Monk. While this could normally be chalked up to “expect the unexpected on Test”, what makes it interesting is that everyone’s Class and Subclass tabs have been relabeled Animalist and Beastlord. This led to early morning...
EQ2Wire‘s Morgan “Feldon” was invited to sit down (virtually at least) with Dellmon and Aliscious for their 29th episode of the EQ2Talk podcast. It was a great pleasure to talk about the present and future of EQ2, Fan Faire, and what goes into running EQ2Wire. From EQ2Talk.com: In this episode, Dellmon and Aliscious are joined by Feldon of EQ2Wire! He talks about how Wire got started and what’s involved in keeping it going. He also gives us his take on some of the things going on in EQ2. And, because we have such an insightful guest, we have our...
SOE’s annual Fan Faire event is moving to autumn next year, well into the school year for many parents and children, but otherwise staying put in Las Vegas and the now familiar Bally‘s hotel. The three dates on offer this time around are: September 13th – 16th, 2012 September 27th – 30th, 2012 October 18th – 21st, 2012 Voting for one of the above three dates for Fan Faire 2012 is only open until August 19, 2011. If you’re wondering why Fan Faire seems locked to Las Vegas and hasn’t traveled to the Midwest or East coasts in many...
From the EQ2 Forums: The Butcherblock server will be offline on Tuesday, August 16, starting at 12:00 AM PDT* for an estimated downtime of 24 hours. This maintenance is being completed for server hardware upgrades. Time Zone Report: PDT: August 16th 12:00AM-11:59PM EDT: August 16th 03:00AM-August 17th 02:59AM BST: August 16th 08:00AM-August 17th 07:59AM CET: August 16th 09:00AM-August 17th 08:59AM
From Xelgad in a thread about the lack of Troubador tweaks in Game Update 61: Between the massive item revamp, the addition of spell auto-attack as well as the over cap conversions and the AA revamp, we haven’t had much time for class tweaks this GU. I look forward to working on the Troubador class as soon as we get some time to spare, and hopefully we’ll be able to come up with something cooler than an overpowered mythical effect. Some pertinent observations on this from EQ2Flames: From Slippery: If you are a dirge and don’t think a change to the myth is coming...
From Gninja on the EQ2 Forums: We will be allowing these events to continue after GU61 goes live. We had originally planned to take them down with GU61 but in order for some of the less populated servers to complete the event we have decided to keep the event running. The merchant will remain for all servers regardless of completion or not but the ground spawns will stop spawning once the event is completed on each server respectfully (After GU61) The ground spawns will remain for servers that have not completed the event until the event is completed.
From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums: Hey guys, we understand that many of you feel strongly against this change. This is why we put things on test, right? We still have a couple of weeks before GU61 hits live. We’re busy finishing up GU61 and fixing bugs, so don’t expect daily responses from us on these issues, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t discussing them internally. UPDATE: We have added an additional quote from Rothgar.
From the EQ2 Forums: GENERAL Fixed a crash that could occur when taking screenshots. POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION Vallon’s Tower Raid Zones All players may now enter the normal, non-challenge Vallon’s Tower x4 raid zone. Players can enter the challenge mode of Vallon’s Tower raid only after someone on the server has defeated Tallon Zek in Challenge mode. Temple of Rallos Zek: Foundation of Stone [Challenge Mode] The greater warboars that spawn during the statue fight now have less health. Their combat madness taunt spell no longer persists through death. Strategist’s Stronghold When Shini-Zon Livia summons the Winds of...
Here’s our final video from SOE Fan Faire 2011 “EverQuest II: Content and Zone Design”. If you’d like to view the transcript from this panel, check out our EQ2 Panel #6 – Content and Zone Design writeup.
Server Upgrades must be getting sufficiently routine for the EQ2 and Network Operations teams such that posting a Status Report or two completely slipped their minds. Players, however, wanted to know: Was Unrest actually upgraded? According to Rothgar, it was: The upgrades were definitely made so you should be seeing improvements. SmokeJumper elaborated: Unrest is definitely upgraded already. All servers except for Butcherblock and Storms have been upgraded now. Butcherblock will be upgraded on the 16th of August. There isn’t an ETA for Storms yet. I’ll post one when we get the date nailed down. Rothgar had a comment...
After a firestorm of player comment, a line item change in the Test Update Notes indicates that Subclass AAs (Alternate Advancements) will be available to low level characters once more. From the EQ2 Test Update Notes: The Subclass Alternate Advancement Tree once again unlocks at level 10. Game Update 61 is expected to go live in the last week of August.
TenTonHammer Interviews Dave Georgeson TenTonHammer, like other Press sites covering SOE (EQ2Wire is a designated ‘Fan Site’ so airfare, hotel, etc. is up to us) made the trek to Fan Faire 2011 to cover EQ2 and other SOE games being showcased. Although TTH hasn’t featured EQ2 all that much in the past few years, they did score exclusive screenshots of Destiny of Velious plus a Dave Georgeson interview. The only other premier multi-MMO site still putting EverQuest II news on their front page these days seems to be Joystiq’s Massively. When TenTonHammer announced their EQ2 Leapers and Gliders Giveaway,...
If you read the above headline and immediately checked your bank statement, well, that’s probably not a bad habit to get into, but we weren’t actually talking about Account Security. In today’s article, we talk about how plat farmers have gotten more sophisticated and are picking SOE’s pocket via new (StationCash Gifting) and old tricks (Legends of Norrath packs). Fraud Happens Every online business has its share of Credit Card Fraud. However digital currencies like StationCash have been especially prone to this problem, due to the immediacy of the conversion from real dollars to virtual ones. Scammers can create...
There are still many unanswered questions about the AA revamp currently on Test, but Summoners, Druids, and Monks so far have gotten one response apiece about specific lines. Xelgad posted to “Focused Minion (and other summoner changes)” on the EQ2 Forums: We decided to scrap the pet Spell Multi-Attack (Doublecast) for several reasons. First, we wanted to move away from pet-specific AAs. As some of you know, scout pets did technically get some benefit from SDA because their attacks are classified as spells, but fighter pets did not really benefit at all. Additionally, in terms of AA versus AA...
From the EQ2 Forums: POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION Temple of Rallos Zek: Foundations of Stone [Challenge] Challenge Mode Statue of Rallos Zek no longer has a Knockback effect associated with his Titanic Swipe AOE.
If I had to summarize Fan Faire in one statement, one consolidated takeaway thought, it would be: We’re gamers too. If we can, let’s give the players what they want. Giving players options and trying new things were the prominent themes throughout Fan Faire’s EQ2 panels. SmokeJumper in particular seemed eager to break away from tradition if it could lead to better gameplay. “Because we’ve always done it that way” must undoubtedly be one of his pet peeves in EQ2 meetings. Yet, it’s been barely three weeks since Fan Faire, and the glossy slides and upbeat pronouncements of flexibility...
Yesterday afternoon at approximately 1:04pm PDT, SOE games and services became inaccessible to a large number of people due to what some observers have described as a routing problem between the San Diego and Dallas, TX routers on the Level 3 backbone. The outage lasted about 10 minutes. Today, at 10:27am PDT, SOE services were again briefly knocked offline, this time for approximately 15 minutes. It’s unclear if this is part of a pattern or a couple of isolated incidents. More as we have it…
Not sure how we missed this, but from EverQuest2.com… The Unrest, Guk and Everfrost servers will be offline on Tuesday, August 2, starting at 2:00 AM PDT for an estimated downtime of 6 hours. This maintenance is being completed for server hardware upgrades. That’s… 2:00~8:00 AM PDT 5:00~11:00 AM EDT 10:00~16:00 BST 11:00~17:00 CET